Calloustown

When It’s Q & A Time

Although they lived in a giant hole, the Masseys didn’t hail from a tribe of cave-dwelling Vicksburg ancestors. They weren’t West Virginia coalminers relocated to Calloustown, South Carolina, who longed for happier times. None of the Masseys suffered from syndromes or diseases or allergies or phobias. They merely lived underground, as blithe and relentless as anyone else in Calloustown. My father didn’t like or trust them, probably because my father built brick walls and walkways, plus the occasional foundation, and the Masseys needed no barriers or welcoming entrances. I never went to art camp, so I can’t draw a picture of my best friend Lincoln Massey’s abode, but it’s like this: you walk about a half mile south from my parents’ house, take a right into the woods, and when you see a door on the ground with a knob sticking out, you’re at the Masseys’ place. The door might be covered in leaves and pine straw, just like the flat shingled roof, if it’s between October and March. To knock on the door, you plain stomp a foot. The whole reason I know Morse code and rudimentary tap dancing emanates from going over to Lincoln’s place most days, bored with a simple bang-bang-bang.

Before I was born — and before Lincoln was born, too — from what I gathered later on in life, Mass Massey had a normal, wooden, one-story cottage with a six-hundred-square-foot bomb shelter built below the garage. The house burned down. My father always said two things about this occasion: “That’s what they get for not having a brick house,” and “Too bad I didn’t have my homemade fire tower built at the time or I could’ve gotten a good view of the flames.”

Five or six years after I was born and discovered the doorknob in the ground, seeing as I could wander the woods and fields with little or no supervision, I heard the true story: Lincoln’s father and mother moved into the undisturbed bomb shelter, he got ahold of a jackhammer, and through industrious hard labor and obsession he had a two-story, then a three-story house, lined with cement blocks, those blocks painted or covered in fabric. There were a lot of lamps, of course. There was a toilet and shower up on the first floor, but I didn’t go to plumbing or engineering camp, either, so I don’t know how those things worked. And I guess I exaggerate somewhat about the knob poking out: If the Masseys were home, there was a car and S.C. Dept. of Transportation truck parked right before the roof.

Mass Massey couldn’t have stood more than five-two or weighed over 130 pounds of pure muscle. He appeared to be coiled at all times and didn’t blink his close-set, agate marble-like eyes. With his shaved head he looked more unforgiving spider monkey than husband and father, and after I tap danced on his door I stood back always, thinking he might pop through the annulled threshold like a jack-in-the-box at the end of its song.

His wife Evelyn, though, was either nearsighted or pious. She stood four inches taller than Mass Massey, wore tight sweaters, and played the role of my pillow when I was thirteen years old and needed a better cushion than my mattress had to offer groin level.

“Be careful of the moles and snakes at night, Reed,” my father said to me whenever I went over there to spend the night. “Don’t think about earthquakes, cave-ins, or worms.” To my mother he said things like, “Mass Massey doesn’t sound much like a commie name, but they got to be communists, what with their wanting to dig a house all the way to China.”

Secretly, my father loved having Mass and Evelyn Massey living nearby, because it made him seem normal. A man who strove to build the tallest fire tower in the state — for no other reason than to prove that he never should have been denied a job with both the forestry commission and the fire department straight out of high school — seemed normal compared to a family of underground misfits.

I always said, “Their house is nice,” seeing as it didn’t have knife-sharpening grinding wheels set up in the den or a disassembled window unit air conditioner on the kitchen table. “You should go over there and see it. Mr. Massey’s got a gigantic collection of arrowheads and spearheads and hatchet heads.”

“That’s good. Maybe he can use those things for ammunition when he digs one foot too deep and opens up a door to Satan’s minions,” I heard my dad say more than once.

My mother said, “Shut up, Dwayne. You’re going to give Reed nightmares.”

“I tell you what gives a kid nightmares — sleeping in an underground house where yellow jackets might come out of the walls at any moment. Or dead people buried nearby, when their graves slide through fissures. Dead people have abnormally gummy teeth. As does Mass Massey. All gums.”

“Go over there and have fun, Reed,” my mother would say. “Be polite. Don’t go telling the Masseys all these things your daddy says. As a matter of fact, try to keep Mr. Massey from talking. He might have a stutter, thus his name.”

I don’t know exactly what the psychological phenomenon might be called, but there has to be a label for how a child — or at least a boy — will almost always tell a neighbor something that he, the boy, was counseled to keep quiet. And then there’s the opposite: what a boy should tell his parents about the neighbors he forever keeps locked inside until, say, twenty-five years later when he’s on a psychiatrist’s couch or, in my case, stuck in stalled traffic with my then-wife June until a coroner showed up to put sheets over the bodies of a dead driver and his passengers up ahead on W. Ponce de Leon Drive. A close, lifelong neighbor can touch a boy’s pecker and take him on weekly convenience store holdups, say, “Don’t tell your mom and dad,” and the kid will turn into a compliant mute until everyone involved trades logic for dementia. That same boy can watch his father throw a dinner plate against the wall out of desperate angry boredom, divinely hear, “It’s a sign of weakness to lose one’s patience and temper, I promise not to act thusly again, don’t tell anyone,” and that boy will practically rent a billboard to announce his father’s weakness.

I sat behind the steering wheel, taking my then-wife June to a lecture over at one of those satellite campuses because she and I were about to give up on our marriage — though we never talked openly about it — and somehow we chose confronting new ideas instead of getting drunk daily as a way to repair our increasingly miserable cohabitation. This particular lecture was open to the public, offered by a female scholar from Mississippi who gained the trust of some Native American potters in New Mexico, where she learned how to build coil pots and fire them in dung. We didn’t know that the wreck ahead involved a dead threesome of migrant workers, two of whom got thrown from the cab of their truck, two of whom got ejected from the bed, one of which was only scraped up miserably and knocked unconscious. I looked at the lane next to mine and noticed a foot-deep pothole and said, “Indirectly, when I was six to twelve years old or thereabouts, I ruined a number of rims, hubcaps, and axles.”

“When it’s Q-and-A time, I’m going to ask that woman if the Hopi Indians were the first to make shallow oval casserole dishes with lids. I think I read somewhere that they were the first to make them, and that Corningware stole the idea.”

People ahead of us began honking. I didn’t mention how it had always been my experience that the people who asked questions at the end of the evening cared more about letting everyone in the audience know how stupid they were instead of needing a valid answer.

June said, “Wait. What did you say?”

My mother had won an Honorable Mention in the Upstate Fair’s craft competition for an egg basket she wove out of kudzu and honeysuckle back in 1972, and for the remainder of her time in Calloustown she concentrated on discovering new homemade dyes and patterns that rivaled “man in the coffin” or “peace pipe” or “snake on the loose.” She wasn’t paying attention to anything I did. My father drove around most days in between jobs, making a list of people who chose wooden fences and gravel paths over brick so he could make a point of shunning those people in public later. I can’t remember for certain, but I think I might’ve spent the night in the Massey hole for entire weekends without my parents even knowing I was missing.

And maybe those creatures did come out of Lincoln Massey’s house at night. I wouldn’t know, for we never stayed there. As soon as it got dark outside, Mass Massey loaded up his son and me in the truck, and we took off all over Gray-wood County, and sometimes right on over to the edge of the Savannah River, probably fifty miles away. Like I said, Mass Massey worked for the South Carolina Department of Transportation. He foremanned a road crew. And I guess with gas prices going up, inflation on the tilt, and the Office of the President being somewhat tenuous most days, Lincoln’s father feared getting laid off. This was the late seventies, both before and after the Iranian hostage crisis.

We got in his truck after supper — and I was glad to get out of their underground house, for the Masseys seemed to eat a lot of fish and the odor of cooked fish forever hovers interminably below the earth like stymied clouds. Maybe they were Catholics. There wasn’t a Catholic church within fifty miles of Calloustown, or a synagogue for a hundred. I never asked anyone’s religion, seeing as I feared a conversation that would include the question of my denomination. My father told me to tell people our preferred denomination was hundreds, then punch their noses if they didn’t laugh.

So we ate fish, waited for nightfall, then emerged from the bunker. Mr. Massey checked the bed of his truck and said out loud, “Shovel, pick, pick.” He touched his temple, looked at us with those beady eyes, and said, “Map.” And then we drove off, found quiet country roads with little traffic until teenage drinkers and dope smokers came out, wary and trustful that highway patrolmen stuck to more traveled stretches of blacktop, got out of the truck, and invented potholes where otherwise good asphalt existed.

“My daddy has to do this in order to keep his job,” Lincoln said each night, like I didn’t remember. “He says when the world runs out of potholes, he’ll run out of paychecks.”

Lincoln and I remained friends throughout our time in Calloustown, then he went off to college and, from what I heard last, worked as a lobbyist in D.C. Fortunately for him, he looked a lot like his mother, though I tried not to think about that when my pillow groaned beneath me on those confusing and hormone-ridden nights.

“Don’t tell anyone about this, Reed. You know that, don’t you? One day you’ll want people to keep your secrets, and they ain’t going to do it if you tell on me. That’s how it works. I’m not sure how or why, but that’s the way things go.”

I never planned on telling anyone about the potholes, especially my parents. I didn’t want Mass Massey finding out, then springing toward me one day from his trapdoor.

June rolled down her window. This was in April. The night before we’d gone to a lecture at the Georgia Center for the Book given by a man who published a memoir on his childhood, living with a manically depressed mother and a skeptical father. Personally, I had sat there mostly unmindful. I had caught myself trying to think of anyone I knew in Calloustown who wasn’t depressed or skeptical, and how perhaps a memoir of an exhilarated and gung-ho family upbringing might offer an obsequious and prurient reading experience.

June said, “See? This is what I’m talking about. How long have we been together? I can’t believe you’ve never told me this story. You’re not making this up, are you?” And then she stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, move! Drive! Somebody pull onto the side of the road!” To me she said, “This isn’t one of those stories you heard from one of the barefoot people, is it?”

June never understood how or why I would work for the nonprofit Shod America, or find both joy and meaning in talking shoe companies into donating their products to poor Appalachian people. My wife, I feel certain now, envisioned herself going from food writer to editor of the Lifestyles section of the paper, then trudging forward from there. June, at this point, liked nothing more than to accept assignments from the paper to cover meaningless black-tie fetes of the unworthy, and then write, in my opinion, insipid narratives of how the chocolate fountain was the hit of the night. She wrote about or how the Pyramid of Cheops ice sculpture coupled with the monoliths of pâté formed to recreate Stonehenge seemed destined to live together at every social function.

When we sat at lectures and demonstrations that were supposed to strengthen our unrevivable union, I thought about how she no longer criticized our state’s politicians or the president. She no longer blurted out things about home-school parents, and in the afterlife I’m going to ask someone in charge if my ex-wife voted libertarian.

“It’s a real story from my life, June,” I said. We didn’t move. A black man walked by on the sidewalk, and June rolled up her window and clicked her door lock. I said, “What the hell’s happened to you?”

“Fuck you, Reed. I would’ve locked the door if a white guy came our way.”

I didn’t say “Bullshit,” but I thought it. In the afterlife I’d hunt June down and say, “Liar.”

How come I had never told my wife of the Masseys? Because when we got along, I didn’t want her to make some kind of unqualified leap in logic, which was how this entire conversation would end. Perhaps in some kind of passive-aggressive way it’s how I wanted our relationship to finally end. Maybe I’d gotten tired of June saying things to me like, “You’ve never had any ambition! What’s the next big career move for a man who doles out new shoes to poor people? Belts? Are you going to move up the ladder and start handing out neckties?”

When we met I had plans for graduate school in anthropology. I’d been accepted into two of the best programs there were, but June had that meaningless degree in journalism and had taken a job in Atlanta because their last food writer died — get this — when her gall bladder exploded. June had said to me, “I am not moving to Michigan or Chicago. How many columns can I write about bratwurst?” Before Shod America, I worked in the Textiles and Social History collection for the Atlanta History Center, receiving and cataloguing more than ten thousand pieces. June had said to me — though she was drunk at the time—“What’s your next step, plastics and social history? Something and anti-social history? You don’t have any sense of drive or accomplishment.”

I don’t know when the transformation took place within her. In the beginning we got along. I don’t want to make any presumptions, but she might’ve thought that my family name — Reddick — meant that I was related to the Reddicks, the ones who made their money in oil, then in newspapers. June drank a bunch for the first few years of our marriage, as did I, so maybe she kept forgetting when I told her I was from the Calloustown Reddicks. Maybe she thought I lied, that I paraded an anonymity-prone nature. I don’t know. From those early years I can only recall June looking like she emerged from a shower with Modigliani, and that she pitched a Sunday column called Bar Naked to her editor, which would include the mastery of mixology coupled with True Weird Tales from real-life publicans. The editor said it might work in Portland, Seattle, or Laramie, but not in the South. June quit drinking. I drank more, haunted daily by quilts and samplers on my job at the museum, then by wingtips and cheap canvas boating shoes when I got to Shod America.

I turned on the radio and tried to scramble past evangelists, country singers, and rappers — who all, oddly, seemed to comment on the same topics — trying to find the Road and Weather Conditions station. June looked at her watch. She said, “There’s no way we’ll make it to the lecture. Damn it. I wanted to learn more about kilns. I’d like to learn how to cook something in a horno, then write about it in my column.”

“Kilns get hot,” I said. “They get hot enough to turn dirt into a brick.” I couldn’t pass up the perfect segue, or what in my wet-brained mind I understood to be perfect and serendipitous cause and effect. I said, “You never met my father, but he knew how to turn clay into bricks, and bricks back into ground, kind of.”

So I had driven around on weekend supply-and-demand forays with Mass Massey and Lincoln, and when I came home on Sundays my mother looked up from her baskets to ask, “What did y’all do this weekend? Did you go fishing?”

“Who names their kid Lincoln in the South?” my father would bellow. “I’m not saying anything racist, but you’d think that more black people would name their kids Lincoln. If I were black, you’d be named either Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or Brown Versus the Board of Education.”

And then I’d ask, “How come you named me Reed?” knowing all along — because my grandfather got drunk and told me — that I’d had a brother named Ed who died long before my birth, and that in actuality my name was Re Ed.

“Never mind that. It’s a good name. In those baby books, it means, ‘cleared land,’” my mother would say.

“And it means something that grows near the water. So you got it either way, either cleared land or something growing on the land,” my father said.

We went through this incessant charade for, I guess, about half the Sundays of every year for three or four years. And then one rainy day I returned from school to find my pure and patient mother crying. My father was to have driven her somewhere with her baskets earlier — she’d improved to the point of people asking if she had nimble-fingered Cherokee blood in her background, had three craft galleries carrying her work in towns where people had money to buy baskets that didn’t hold green plastic grass and screw-top eggs filled with cheap chocolate — and she carried them on her lap. She didn’t want them in the back of the truck, seeing as it rained. My father hit a pothole, she lurched forward, the baskets got crushed, and she broke two ribs.

She didn’t blame him because, for once, it wasn’t his fault. The particular pothole — and I remembered shoveling it out while Mass and Lincoln Massey picked extra hard, out near the center of the blacktop — must’ve been eighteen inches deep. The hole disappeared once rainwater filled it up, at least to an unsuspecting and non-prescient driver.

My mother’s ruined baskets ended up reparable, as did her ribs. But my father took it as a sign: that he’d been punished by God because of his own shortcomings, failures, and mean-spirited acts that he wouldn’t divulge completely. I remember only his getting home, having me help him try to bang out the damaged left front rim of his truck, and saying, “There are some incidents for which I need to atone.” I remember all of this because it came out so grammatically correct and biblical. “I’ll probably need your help.”

My father fixed his wheel as best he could. He checked in on my mother, fetched aspirin and ice packs, asked if she wanted any gum, and handed me a ball-peen hammer. Out back, below the homemade fire tower that at this point stood eight or ten feet high, my father kept a stack of broken bricks. He retrieved a washtub and two old stumps for us to sit on like ancient narcissistic whittlers. He stood up and stared at an outbuilding, told me to go fill up a wheelbarrow with some sawdust he had piled up in case I ever decided to become a pole vaulter or high jumper, and came back with a bag of cement. I said, “There’s no way we can glue these pieces of brick back together.”

“No,” he said. “No, we’re doing the opposite.” And then my father told me to break the bricks up further and transfer any pieces smaller than dimes into the washtub. We worked hard together, and played a guessing game with our plink-plink-plinking. “Three Blind Mice” was easy to make out, but not so songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” My father mixed the brick crumbles, sawdust, and cement together, and three hours later we loaded the heavy, impossible mixture into the back of his truck and took off with a hoe, two broken shovel handles, and a dozen plastic jugs of water.

I said, “Why don’t we just call the South Carolina Department of Transportation? Why don’t we go over to Lincoln’s daddy’s house and tell him about the potholes? He works a job telling people to fill the things in.”

My father didn’t say anything about Mass Massey being communist, Catholic, atheist, or werewolf. He said, “Mr. Massey has enough things to do besides having someone outside of his work tell him he doesn’t have enough things to do.” And then, mostly beneath his breath, he said, “I need to do this in case there’s really a Heaven.”

Was he feeling guilty about naming me Re Ed, and dooming me to live up to my unknown dead brother’s prospective reputation? Had he wronged my mother more than what was perceptible? Was my father feeling guilt for never living up to my grandfather’s expectations? I never learned the truth. We found the first overt and culpable hole, filled it up, poured water on top, and mixed it together into a foul ashen sludge. Drivers slowed and veered.

“How long will it take for this to dry? Maybe we should borrow some of those orange cones and put them around this thing so people don’t drive into it,” I said. “I know where to get some. Mr. Massey keeps a bunch of cones in the back of his work truck.”

My father stretched his back and groaned. He said, “I didn’t think about that. Huh. Damn, I didn’t think about that, Reed. Good thinking. It’ll stay gummy too long for us to hang around waiting.”

I stood there alone while my father drove to my best friend’s underground house. He tied a red oil rag to one of the broken shovel handles and said, “Stand in front of the hole and wave this around. If it looks like someone’s not going to slow down or move over, jump.”

It all worked out well. People saw me and they slowed. A few drivers asked if I was okay, I explained the situation, and they thanked me. One guy said there should be a Boy Scout badge for such community-spirited causes. My father returned, we put up two cones, and we drove onward to the next potential disaster.

“Did your father explain it all to Mr. Massey?” June asked me in the traffic jam. An ambulance, driving on the sidewalk, passed us with its lights on but no siren blaring.

“I have no clue. I asked him, he said I asked too many questions, and that was it. He said it might be best if I never brought this up to Lincoln’s daddy, so I have a feeling he plain stole the cones,” I said.

“You come from a fucked-up place,” June said. I looked forward. The driver in front of me put on his left-hand blinker and crept slowly ahead. June said, “First off, you could’ve potentially killed people with the potholes, and then your father could’ve gotten you killed — or kidnapped — leaving you there in the middle of the road.”

I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t mention how Calloustown wasn’t the kind of place, back then, where hit-and-runs or kidnapping occurred.

When we got to the site of the wreck, June rolled her window down. She said, “Is everyone all right?” to a highway patrolman who brandished an unlit flashlight.

He said, “Mexicans. Three dead, one unconscious. One of them might be all right, unless the emergency room doctor does the right thing. Maybe they’ll send him back before he wakes up.” I had never known a highway patrolman to offer the results of a car wreck to passersby and wondered if he’d committed some kind of misdemeanor.

My wife laughed.

I looked at her and said, “That’s not funny. What has happened to you?”

June said, “Give it a break, Reed. I’m only interacting with another human being.”

I thought, mass murderers might say the same thing on a witness stand. Rapists might do the same, and child molesters.

She said, “At least I didn’t break my mother’s ribs.”

When we got to the lecture, people filed out of the auditorium. June and I took a different route back home, and we didn’t speak, that I remember. In the kitchen, later, June looked at a calendar she kept on the side of the refrigerator. She mentioned that we had a cooking demonstration the following night at six o’clock over at the farmer’s market, that the chef and author would be using kale in every recipe, and that nutritionists worldwide now touted kale as one of the new organic wonder foods, filled with vitamin A and calcium. June told me that vitamin A was all about eyesight and asked me if I cared to see well for a long time, or if I’d rather live in the dark like all my old friends in their underground lairs.

I might’ve shrugged. I squinted to look at the calendar, but thought more about which vitamins best kept livers thriving. I thought about Lincoln, which made me think of emancipation. I wondered if there was a vitamin for foresight. We have all kinds of lectures and demonstrations to attend to straighten our lives, I almost said. And then I thought about those sadly doomed people born with holes in their hearts, on edge, I imagined, from impending merciless misfortunes.